STREAMLINING DEVOPS TASKS WITH BARE METAL CLOUD
Glimpse tests its CI/CD workloads on Bare Metal Cloud to ensure faster release cycles through automated server provisioning.
Glimpse is a fast-growing online membership platform built to enable digital creators to share, promote, and monetize their content. Through diverse multimedia storing and sharing options, the platform makes it easy for creators to launch and grow an online subscription business.
Glimpse’s core business centers around a userfriendly and highly intuitive web and mobile application that handles customer data, content exchange, payment information, and communication between creators and consumers. Users can set up multi-tier sponsorships, gate content, modify pricing on the go, and take payments directly from their fans. Glimpse's token system ensures higher revenue compared to similar platforms, making it a great choice for developing an online subscription business.
The Glimpse development team leverages DevOps principles and practices to deliver new features and functionalities to production faster with regular updates to the app’s existing codebase. Implementing agile methodologies has made it possible for them to speed up the release cycle and eliminate high build failure rates. This has resulted in the delivery of quality code to production in a more efficient way.
To support this agile development method, Glimpse needed a robust server infrastructure that delivers superior performance, more control over security, and increased flexibility. Their development team tested its workloads on phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud. As a DevOps-oriented server platform, Bare Metal Cloud was able to meet all Glimpse’s requirements related to automated server provisioning, global scalability, and integrations with third-party automation tools.
“Bare Metal Cloud seemed like a perfect fit for us because it provided us with all the DevOps tools and resources that we were already using. Another big plus for us was the fact that Bare Metal Cloud was built on top of open-source technologies, just like most of our environment. We don’t want to get locked in with proprietary technologies, and Bare Metal Cloud allows us to build environments and apps that fit our specific needs.“
CHALLENGE
The Glimpse app runs predominantly in a containerized environment. Its core infrastructure sits in Kubernetes clusters spread across numerous locations that communicate with each other through an API. Cloud-based services such as Kube Prometheus Stack, Tiller, and EFK were also implemented to streamline environment management and monitoring. The platform utilizes open-source tools and technologies such as GNU/Linux and PVE. In addition to this, the Glimpse development team also heavily relies on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools to facilitate automated server provisioning and code-based infrastructure management.
phoenixNAP’s Managed Private Cloud (MPC) platform gives Glimpse all the IT resources it needs to set up and maintain efficient DevOps workflows. The company also tested Bare Metal Cloud to assess the possibility of moving a portion of its workloads to it. As an automation-driven platform, Bare Metal Cloud offers additional flexibility for the Glimpse team to provision and manage IaaS resources, while using existing DevOps tools
“To support our workloads, we need infrastructure that is fast, reliable, and agile. When choosing an infrastructure solution, we are looking for simple self-service, global scalability, and support for automation through APIs. phoenixNAP’s Managed Private Cloud (MPC) meets all our needs right now, but we see Bare Metal Cloud as a platform that will allow us to scale more easily in future. We liked the ability to utilize our preferred Infrastructure as Code tools to provision server clusters automatically without using the web-based dashboard.“
SOLUTION
In an effort to find a single solution that would address all their challenges, the Glimpse development team decided to test their CI/CD workloads on phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud platform.
Performance
As a single-tenant, non-virtualized server platform, Bare Metal Cloud provided Glimpse with dedicated compute resources and high-speed, Intel-powered servers. Its performance potential enables Glimpse to significantly boost performance when running automated integration workloads using Jenkins. As a result, they are able to improve the efficiency of their CI/CD pipeline for lower build failure rates and faster code releases.
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Ansible
Leveraging different IaC tools with Bare Metal Cloud, Glimpse can automate resource provisioning and scaling. The team mainly works with Terraform and Ansible, both of which are integrated with Bare Metal Cloud. Terraform facilitates management of all critical IT resources and Bare Metal Cloud comes with a certified Terraform module. This makes it easier to deploy and manage physical servers with simple code instructions.
The Terraform module communicates with the Bare Metal Cloud API. Glimpse was able to start using Terraform right away to provision clusters of servers across different geographic locations. There was no need for the Glimpse team to build custom Terraform integrations.
In addition to Terraform, Glimpse also leverages Ansible for configuration management and scaling operations related to Kubernetes clusters. Ansible is also instrumental in automating security safeguards for their Kubernetes clusters. Bare Metal Cloud comes with a custom-built Ansible module that makes managing environments and security configurations as easy as writing a couple of lines of code.
Scalability
Offering over 20 different server instance types, Bare Metal Cloud enables Glimpse to deploy compute and memory-optimized server instances in minutes. Available in Phoenix, Ashburn, Singapore, and Amsterdam, memory-optimized server instances in minutes. Available in Phoenix, Ashburn, Singapore, and Amsterdam, Bare Metal Cloud allows Glimpse to replicate its workloads across numerous locations by leveraging lightningfast transfer speeds of up to 50 Gbps. This has shortened the average time to recovery and made it possible for Glimpse to bring their app closer to the edge, thus reducing time-to-market timeframes.
Reduced costs
Glimpse can optimize its infrastructure spending with pay-per-use billing options. Bare Metal Cloud usage is billed on an hourly basis, which helps the Glimpse team optimize costs and eliminates the need to spend capital on unused server resources. In addition to this, Glimpse can reserve server instances for a longer period and take advantage of pricing discounts. Apart from hourly billing, Bare Metal Cloud offers monthly and yearly reservations at a lower price point.
“The fact that Bare Metal Cloud is a certified Terraform provider is of critical importance for us. Terraform is an essential tool for us, enabling us to manage servers, Kubernetes clusters, and other resources. Having installed the BMC Terraform provider, we were able to quickly provision a cluster of servers and delete it with only a couple of lines of code.“
BENEFITS
Bare Metal Cloud provides the Glimpse development team with a turnkey infrastructure solution. Fostering an automation-first approach to infrastructure, Bare Metal Cloud ensures faster time to market, improved agility, and accelerated development workflows. It provides the Glimpse development team with all the necessary tools and resources for building and running successful CI/CD pipelines in one place.
- More flexibility and control over infrastructure spending with hourly billing and discounted reservation options
- Ability to leverage ready-to-go IaC modules and other automation technologies to enable faster provisioning and easier resource management at scale
- Improved agility through accelerated release cycles
- Reliable performance and more freedom to customize environments based on specific requirements
- Global scalability made easy across the US, Europe, and Asiac
- Provisioning physical servers in minutes without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure
“We’ve been following the development of Bare Metal Cloud closely from the start. It has quickly matured into a powerful platform that addresses the needs of organizations like Glimpse. We need physical servers delivered at cloud speed but without the configuration complexities. Bare Metal Cloud does away with those challenges and provides a stable and powerful server platform for running DevOpsspecific workloads. We’re excited to see where Bare Metal Cloud takes us next.“